Thursday, 28th March 2024 17:16
Home / Uncategorized / ANZPT Melbourne: Enjoying the ride with Tristan Bain

“Stick around and watch me give it all back!”

Those were the words of Aussie young gun Tristan Bain after he raked in a massive pot to eliminate arguably the biggest name in the room in Australia’s World Champion in Joe Hachem.

Bain had flopped a set as Hachem got aggressive on the flop with the nut flush draw. Hachem made his flush on the turn but was denied when the river paired the board to give Bain the full house.

“You’ve seen me do it before!” Bain added as we counted his stack at a tournament-leading 200,000. He was right. We had seen him ride some of the biggest waves in tournaments before.

We’d watched him online run all the way to 6th place in the PokerStars 10th Anniversary Sunday Million. That tournament had a staggering 62,116 entrants and Bain pocketed US$255,368.40 that day for his efforts.

Despite that pedigree, we also knew he was capable of going from chip leader to the rail in a matter of minutes, such is his relentlessly aggressive style of play. Yet for some reason we did not heed his advice to stick around.

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We turned away from the table for a few minutes and when we returned, Bain’s stack had been halved and Luis Arrilucea was now sitting behind the biggest stack in the room.

“It was seven-high against nine-high!” laughed Pat Dillon from across the table.

With Arrilucea and Bain seemingly playing every pot, we decided to stick around for an orbit to observe potentially more carnage.

It started with a misdeal before Bain min-raised under the gun. Again Arrilucea decided to buck heads as he three-bet to 11,300. We thought our timing was going to be perfect, but Bain gave it up.

Of course next hand, he was in the thick of it again.

Action folded to the small blind who raised a rather large 5.5x to 11,000. Bain took a glance and moved all in holding Aâ™  9♣ but failed to run down his opponent’s Q♣ Q♥ .
“No worries,” chuckled Bain as his once-mighty empire was now down to 55,000.

The next four hands saw Bain tighten up, before opening from middle position on hand #7. Again Arrilucea gave action with a call and the two saw a 3♣ K♣ 6♥ flop. This time Bain was successful with a continuation bet of 4,400 to collect a small pot.

The next few hands saw plenty of action, but sadly for our story, Bain stayed out of the way. I guess his stack of 60,000, good for around 30 big blinds, is a tricky stack size, and just one big hand away from either comfort or disaster. Either way, Bain won’t be sitting around wondering. You’ll most likely find him in the thick of the action.

At the recent break, PokerStars hostess Lynn Gilmartin caught up with Day 1a chip leader Billy Jordanou to talk about his tournament progress so far:


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